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Tag Archives: ayreon

Here is my “Top Rated” playlist on my iPod. Just to give you some background: I sync my iPod play count with my iTunes and use AutoRate to rate the songs. You can’t see that in the latest version, but AutoRate uses play count, skip count, last time played and a decay to rate your songs (I haven’t checked the algorithm itself, even being an open source project.)

Anyway, the list:

009 Sound System – Dreamscape Long Edit (Annex Trax, Vol I)

Alanis Morissette – Thank You (Alanis Morissete: The Collection)

Annie Lennox – Walking on Broken Glass (Diva)

Arena – Tears in the Rain (The Visitor)

Avanatsia – Lost in Space (Lost in Space Part 2 – Avantasia)

Avantasia – Farewell (The Metal Opera)

Avantasia – I Don’t Believe in Your Love (The Scarecrow)

Avantasia – Lost in Space (Lost in Space Part 1 – Avantasia)

Avantasia – Lost in Space (The Scarecrow)

Avantasia – Sign of the Cross (The Metal Opera)

Avantasia – The Looking Glass (The Metal Opera, Part II)

Avantasia – The Scarecrow (The Scarecrow)

Avantasia – The Story Ain’t Over (Lost in Space Part 1 – Avantasia)

Ayreon – Act III “Visual Echos” (The Final Experiment)

Ayreon – Computer Eyes (Actual Fantasy)

Ayreon – Connect the Dots (01011001)

Ayreon – Day Five: Voices (The Human Equation (disc 1))

Ayreon – Day One: Vigil (The Human Equation (disc 1))

Ayreon – Day Seven: Hope (The Human Equation (disc 1))

Ayreon – Temple of the Cat (Universaion Migration, Part I)

Ayreon – Tower of Hope (Into the Electric Castle (disc 2))

Ayreon vs Avantasia – Elected (Elected EP)

Carol Woods & Timoty T. Mitchel – Let It Be (Across the Universe)

CCP: Jon Hallur – Akat Montains

CCP: Jon Hallur – Retribution

Cohed & Cambria – Welcome Home (Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV)

Conjure One – Dying Light feat. Joanna Stevens (Extraordinary Ways)

Conjure One – Sleep feat. Maire Claude D’Ubaldo (Conjure One)

Crowded House – Fall at Your Feet (Recurring Dream: The Very Best of Crowded House)

After almost four years, Arjen Anthony Lucassen released the new Ayreon album, 01011001. My guess is that Arjen decided this would be the album that would connect all Ayreon stories, from the blind minstrel to the last migrator. And it does. Unfortunately, from a musical stand point, the album fails to deliver anything impressive.

The songs are completely unimaginative. Sometimes, when not paying attention to the lyrics, I thought I was hearing some other Ayreon album. The same rhythm, the same sounds… nothing new. And when Hansi Kürsch sings, it really feels like you are listening to Blind Guardian, not Ayreon (in contrast, when Mike Baker sung in “The Human Equation”, you didn’t feel like listening to Shadow Gallery. And I would dare to say that when James LaBrie sung in the same album, it also didn’t feel like Dream Theater.)

So far, I would say that’s the weakest of all the albums. But who knows, maybe that was the idea, to give people some context for the next album…

So, first I didn’t understand why Amazon MP3 was available globally. Then I bought I MacBook and start using the iTMS and thought “now I can have anything I want.”

Yesterday, for some stupid reason, I decided to change the country in the iTMS listing. Why? Well, for a long time I’m waiting for “Edguy – Scarecrow” and “Ayreon – 01011001” to show up, but none of those are available. So I changed the store to Germany and guess what? There they are. “Ok, I’ll buy them now, then. I don’t care paying in euros.” Well, the thing is, you can’t buy things that are not available in your account country.

And that’s something that really annoys me. In one hand, you have all the major record companies complaining about piracy and, in the other, they make things harder to get if you’re not in one of the major countries. The greatest failure of the record companies is not realizing that this thing called “internet” actually works in the whole planet, not just some countries.